Platform: PC (Steam Early Access)
Developer: Shiro Games
Publisher: Shiro Games
It’s easy to jump into the world of Farever. If you’ve played a modern-gen Zelda game, or Genshin Impact, or most open world RPGs, you already have a good idea how Farever plays: explore the world, battle monsters, find loot, and grow stronger. And do it all with others!
Farever doesn’t exactly break the genre mold, and the Early Access version is incredibly rough. But there’s a solid online action-RPG simmering just beneath the surface.
Read on for our Early Access Review of Farever!
MMO-lite
At Early Access launch, Farever has four classes: Warrior, Mage, Priest, and Rogue. I usually play Rogues or Warriors in my fantasy RPGs, but this time I created a Mage. The class determines class skills, as well as which weapons I can wield. In the case of a mage, I use spellbooks, and my initial spellbook contains fire spells.
Like many RPGs, I begin on a beach, with very little fanfare. The online game knows I’m one of many adventurers; pretty much the opposite of a Chosen One. But I would’ve liked a bit more story context — and especially, an actual tutorial.
Farever does an incredibly poor job explaining its systems. While it’s true that too many games go overboard with hand-holding and tutorializing over their first dozen hours, Farever explains almost nothing. The game presumes I’ve played MMO-style fantasy RPGs before (I have), and simply sets me loose in its large world.
There’s always something interesting to check out
The beach is full of giant crabs, and my initial quest is to simply kill a bunch and turn in some of their claws. The most basic of MMO fetch quests.
Combat is entirely cooldown based. My basic attacks deal quick fire damage, while every third attack charges a more powerful blast. My main skill is a charged fireball. It deals a lot of damage and applies a burning effect, but it’s on a long cooldown. My second attack is much quicker, stunning enemies who are burning.
The strategy becomes simple but effective — begin each battle by launching a fireball. Then use my basic attack alongside the stun blast. Most similarly-leveled enemies die around the time they reach me, which is good because I’m quit squishy!
Boss battles where a whole different matter, however.
I quickly learned not to let this oversize boar hit me too many times
Thankfully I have a dodge, and as a mage I also learn a quick teleport dash, and a protective shield. Every class can also block to reduce damage, and reduce damage even further by timing it perfectly (a system I always appreciate).
But even while blocking, meatier enemies can tear me up pretty quick. And facing a boss? I learn the hard way that it’s best not to get hit at all.
Unfortunately, delivering that same combo again and again over the first several hours grows repetitive. Leveling is respectfully slow and methodical, and I still haven’t ever found a new spellbook, or any other weapon. I end up using the same three or four skills every time (my little mage laser blast thing is incredibly underpowered). Fighting more than one enemy as a solo player is possible, but incredibly dangerous, and probably more so for a squishy mage!
Lost Farever
The world of Farever is clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda, with its colorful art style and easy-to-navigate mountains and plateaus. There’s no climbing here, but the world is full of springboards, grapple points, and stepped mountain paths that make getting around fun and interesting.
One of the early tasks after leaving the tutorial area is to scale a daunting mountain spire by collecting a series of cubes. This mixed quite a bit of platforming across moving, floating rocks, with combat encounters that limited my mobility and challenged my dodging skills. Once I fell off, I later realized I could quickly teleport back to the last cube I’d collected, which was a nice feature.
This partially floating mountain is a major platforming challenge
Making it to the top of the mountain felt great, and I was able to snag some nice treasures.
Farever also features an entire crafting system with multiple professions, which I haven’t figured how to unlock. It’s party of the game’s shocking lack of information and guidance; I have no idea where to go or who to find to even check these systems out (and my inventory is full of crafting supplies!).
At one point I was told to buy a net and use it to capture companions, but no clue how that system works or where to find these critters (I realize the net can be equipped, but I also realize I can’t equip it in the middle of combat, making it dangerous to run around with).
I also experienced a few bugs and lots of performance issues.
Farever is online-only, and many times while trying to login the server would fail. One time I defeated a boss of a dungeon and went to loot the big treasure chest, and the game crashed. When I logged back in, I was outside the dungeon instance (thankfully the quest-giver at least acknowledged that I had defeated the boss).
The first area is impressively large
The game also constantly hiccuped, lagged, and stuttered, whether running around the world, or in the middle of combat. In combat this could turn deadly, as I fired off an extra attack after the enemy died, instantly targeting another enemy that I was unprepared to fight.
I only saw a handful of other players running around, or rather, riding on cool mounts that I could only gawk at. Definitely feels like an MMO!
Single player works fine, but Farever would definitely work best as an online co-op adventure. However, Shiro Games has to tamp down the bugs, vastly improve the performance, and provide much better on-boarding for new players. Also, more weapon variety early on, pretty please?
The good news is that this is very much an Early Access title and lots of improvements and fixes should be forthcoming over the next year or so (the developers recently revealed the Early Access roadmap). I’m ultimately optimistic about the quality of the core gameplay: a fun mix of old school MMORPG and modern 3D Zelda, and I hope to revisit Farever when it’s fully ready.
Farever is currently available via Steam Early Access.
